CSE Undergrad News

UW IEEE-HKN Student Branch

Have fun with your fellow CSE majors this Friday, February 14th, at 3:30pm in the Atrium! We will have lots of root beer, ice cream, and other sodas to enjoy. See you there!

What: Float Day!

Where: Atrium

When: 2/14, 3:30pm

Why: Ice Cream, Root Beer, and Soda with your friends!

Our annual Winter Fest is Friday February 28th, 5:30-8:30pm in the Atrium! Join us for food, drinks*, and games.

Winter Fest is free to all local ACM chapter members, otherwise $5.

Not a UW ACM member, but want to be? Bring $8 and sign up so you can get in free to all our other future events. 🙂

CSE undergraduates, graduates, faculty, and staff are welcome.

RSVP on FB at: https://www.facebook.com/events/289870167826956/

* Must have ID and be 21+ for alcohol.

For more information and immediate event notification, please like us on facebook or follow us on twitter.

Overview:

2/10 – Adobe Tech Talk

2/11 – EMC Isilon Tech Talk

2/12 – Expedia Tech Talk

2/13 – Palantir Tech Talk

2/14 – eBay Virtual Networking Event: Is it harder for women in tech?

2/14 – ACM Float Day!

Adobe Technical Talk: Dynamic Media Advanced Product Development

2/10; 6:00 – 7:00pm; EEB105

COME LEARN, NETWORK, AND ENJOY COMPLIMENTARY LUNCH. Win an Adobe Creative Cloud membership. We’ll have a raffle at the end of the Info Session. SPEAKER: David Simons, Principal Scientist and James Acquavella, Principal Scientist VENUE: University of Washington, Electrical Engineering Building, Room 105 DATE: February 10, 2014 TIME: 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM www.adobe.com/university

EMC Isilon Tech Talk

2/11; 6:00 – 7:00pm; EEB125

84 Petabytes Largest Deal in the History of EMC EMC Isilon Tech Talk Speaker: Steven Lockhart – Software Engineer February 11 @ 6:00pm, EEB 125 Food/Drinks provided EMC Isilon builds the world’s largest, fastest filesystem using clustered computing development in both the kernel and userspace, delivering a proprietary distributed filesystem on top of FreeBSD. Learn how you can solve challenging problems in scalability, help drive cloud computing and storage to new levels, and work where you can make a difference. Visit me.emc.com, or email Alex.Brynza@Isilon.com to learn more about our opportunities

Expedia Tech Talk

2/12; 6:00 – 7:30pm; EEB105

Palantir Tech Talk

2/13; 6:00 – 7:30pm; EEB125

Palantir Technologies Tech Talk Thursday, February 13th 6pm-7:30pm EEB 125 Dinner from Little Thai will be provided Enter raffle to win a prize! Please join Palantir Technologies, to learn how we are revolutionizing the analysis of hard and important problems that face our world today. We build the technology that allows people at the world’s most critical institutions to make sense of their data.We solve the technical problems, so they can solve the human ones. Combating terrorism. Tracking disease outbreaks. Finding missing and exploited children. We believe that with the right technology and enough data, people can still solve hard problems and change the world for the better. View a live demo of our data fusion platforms, and learn how you can be a part of our mission. www.palantir.com We are hiring! http://www.palantir.com/careers/OpenPositionLanding

eBay virtual networking event: Is it harder for women in tech?

2/14; 1:00 – 2:00pm; log on: http://www.collegefeed.com/networking

PRIVATE NETWORKING EVENT Is It Harder For Women In Tech? Friday, February 14th, 1:00 p.m. PST Join for the online discussion LOG ON: http://www.collegefeed.com/networking Guest speaker: Laura Chambers, Head of University Programs, eBay Inc. Laura Chambers is head of University Programs for eBay Inc. – responsible for identifying and hiring top talent from Universities, and setting them up for successful careers at the company. eBay Inc.’s University Programs team strives to change the trajectory of eBay Inc.’s impact on the world by attracting the world’s most sought after University talent, and unlocking their potential. Throughout her eight year career at PayPal and eBay, Chambers has held numerous roles in PayPal, Marketplaces, Skype and eBay Inc. Highlights include heading Mobile at PayPal, running Consumer Products at Skype, and being chief of staff for the CEO at eBay Inc.

Float Day

2/14; 3:30pm; Atrium

Enjoy root beer floats, ice cream, and other sodas with your friends!

If you picked up a lanyard for the recruiting fair last week, please drop it back off in the CSE front office.  We do plan on reusing them, and the more you can give back to us better it will be for both us and the environment.

We appreciate your help with this!

Hulu is having an Open House Thursday February 20th:

As undergraduate leaders in Computer Science at the University of Washington, you’re in a great position to join us for an open house event at our Seattle office! Come learn about the tech teams based in Seattle, find out what it’s like to be a Hulugan, and eat some great food! All are welcome and we encourage you to bring friends. Please see below for the official invite where you can input your RSVP. If you have any questions, feel free to contact Lauren Fischer at  lauren.fischer@hulu.com.

http://www.evite.com/event/005B6NKI3LEQDIHT6EPDPYVHSESJVM

The application for CSE direct exchanges in 2014-15 is now open! The deadline to apply is midnight on Monday, February 17. The application is located here:
https://catalyst.uw.edu/webq/survey/cseadv/49599

CSE has exchange agreements with three excellent universities: KTH in Sweden, ETH in Switzerland, and Saarland University in Germany. Students earn 400-level CSE credit that fulfills major requirements. More information is available here:
http://www.cs.washington.edu/students/ugrad/exchanges/

Applicants will be notified of decisions via email by March 1st. If selected, students must commit to the exchange by March 14th.

Email Raven (ravena@cs.washington.edu) with any questions.

For more information and immediate event notification, please like us on facebook or follow us on twitter.

Overview:

2/3 – Logos Tech Talk

2/4 – Splunk Tech Talk

2/5 – Mock Technical Interviews

2/6 – Microsoft Office Hours

2/6 – Twitter Tech Talk

Logos Tech Talk

2/3; 6:00-7:15pm; EEB105

Dinner Provided Logos offers the world’s premier Bible study software, along with the Faithlife Study Bible (the world’s most advanced study Bible), Faithlife.com (an online community that connects Christians from all around the world), Proclaim (a cloud-based church presentation tool), and Vyrso (an electronic reading application).

Splunk Tech Talk

2/4; 6:00-7:30pm; EEB125

Mock Technical Interviews

2/5; 5:00pm-8:15pm; Paul G Allen Center for CSE

Practice interviews! If going should have already signed up for this event.

Microsoft Office Hours

2/6; 1:00-2:30pm; Atrium

Twitter Tech Talk: #TwitterStormIsComing #RealTime #BigData @Twitter

2/6; 5:30-7:30pm; EEB125

FREE SWAG (#UDUB shirts) and FOOD SERVED! #TwitterAtUDUB @TwitterU

Twitter is all about real time – real time conversations, real time trends, real time search and real time content dissemination. Twitter has invested in a massive data pipeline that collects, aggregates, processes large volumes of data in real time. At the heart of the pipeline is Twitter Storm, a real-time stream processing engine. In this talk, we will give an overview of real time analytics, discuss the twitter real time data pipeline and how Storm is used for extracting analytics. We will also discuss the challenges we faced and lessons we have learned while building this infrastructure at Twitter.

For more information and immediate event notification, please like us on facebook or follow us on twitter.

Overview:

Like normal, the first Sunday of February the ACM officers will be cleaning out the ACM fridge and Freezer. Please have anything you want to save out of there before midday Sunday.

Please join the eScience Institute on Wednesday, February 5th at 4:30 pm in the Gates Commons (CSE 691).   Refreshments will be provided.    PLEASE NOTE NEW SEMINAR LOCATION.

 Joseph L. Hellerstein (Google):

Lessons Learned from Teaching Biochemistry to Computer Scientists

In the Fall of 2013, I taught an introductory course on biochemistry as a CSE 599 class. My objective was to help CS students and faculty acquire knowledge that will allow them to operate as peers with researchers in the life sciences. The course focused on proteins, enzymes, and a molecular understanding of the “central dogma” of biology – replication, transcription, and translation.  

At first glance, biochemistry seems far afield from computer science, especially for students with no recent background in chemistry (and who have never taken organic chemistry, the standard pre-requisite for biochemistry). However, I discovered that much of biochemical knowledge involves concepts and tools that are an integral part of computer science. 

First, a lot of the difficulty with learning biochemistry is that it deals with complex structures such as large molecules, cells, and organs. It turns out that tools such as the Unified Modeling Language (UML) are extremely effective for representing complex biochemical structures. Indeed, my class often had great discussions about the design of UML structures for proteins and metabolites; these discussions were an excellent vehicle for understanding concepts in biochemistry.

A second impediment to learning biochemistry, in my opinion, is that it is taught with an impoverished discussion of the computational problems being addressed by life processes. One example of this is cellular pathways. These are workflows. But I have never seen biochemists use the rich representations and tools of computer science in their discussion of pathways. Another example of computational problems solved by life processes is cellular transport of molecules, such as the transport of secretory proteins. Much of the complexity here is about the way addressing and routing works, something that is fairly digestible to a mature computer science student.

This lecture will discuss the pedagogy that worked well, what didn’t work, and how I plan to radically restructure the class when I teach it in Spring quarter.

Bio

Joseph Hellerstein is an Engineering Manager at Google, Seattle and a Senior Data Science Fellow with eSciences at the University of Washington. 

Upcoming Seminars:

* February 12, 4:30 PM (CSE 691)

 Joel Zylberberg  (UW Applied Mathematics)

Computational Neuroscience: from the top-down, the bottom-up and everything in between

* February 19, 4:30 PM (CSE 691)

Steven Roberts  (UW Aquatic & Fishery Sciences)

TBD

* March 5, 4:30 PM (CSE 691)

Chris Bretherton  (UW Atmospheric Science and Applied Mathematics)

Big Data meets Big Models: Weather Forecasting and Climate Modeling